Numinous Encounters in Frederick Douglass's Autobiographies

Abstract

Scholars of many disciplines have used the three autobiographies of escaped Maryland slave Frederick Douglass as valuable tools to help understand both slavery and the status of African Americans in post-emancipation United States.This essay employs the insights of analytic psychology to assess Douglass's reflections in his autobiographies of pivotal movements on his path to freedom.In particular, "numinous" experiences recounted in these autobiographies will be shown to have had profound psychological influences that propelled Douglass forward on his journey to becoming a free man.Theologian Rudolf Otto first discussed the idea of the holy or numinous in his classic The Idea of the Holy (1923) to describe the "gradual shaping and filling in with ethical meaning . . . of what was a unique original feeling-response" that can be experientially encountered within or without religion (p. 6).Otto proceeds to describe the nature of these encounters with divine wisdom or inner knowing as:[A] mental state . . .irreducible to any other; . . . it cannot be strictly defined.There is only one way to help another to an understanding of it.He must be guided and led on by consideration and discussion of the matter through the ways of his own mind, until he reaches the point at which 'the numinous' in him perforce begins to stir, to start into life and into consciousness.(p.7) Incidents in Douglass's life as a slave in which he experienced moments of profound, mystical insight are evidence of the divine at work in his life and these encounters have a numinous quality.It is this awakening that Douglass reports as he begins comprehending the facts of his situation as a slave and developing a faith that he is destined by a higher power for freedom that were psychologically pivotal numinous events.These experiences are critical for his individuation as a free man and the abolitionist he becomes as he works towards his and other enslaved persons empowerment.Numinous encounters with the divine require a particular understanding of faith that is grounded in ontological being.It is faith that is discovered in a belief that one matters.Theologian Paul Tillich describes the idea of faith in this way: "Faith is the state of being grasped by the power of being-itself.The courage to be is an expression of faith and what 'faith' means must be understood through the courage to be" (1952).The kind of faith that is under discussion here is inextricably linked to numinous encounters because these are interior experiences provoked by external circumstances that demand the acknowledgement that one's humanity matters.Jungian analyst Leslie Stein (2019) has written extensively about numinous encounters and describes the sudden and overwhelming nature of these experiences as resulting in the consciousness being altered by "a truth that cannot be denied . . .that submerges the individual in the deepest aspects of their psyche: the archetypes of the collective unconscious, wherein a truth is revealed." 1 These incidents can be understood as numinous experiences: sudden, an overwhelming experience of archetypal energies emerging and piercing conscious awareness that 1 Stein, 73